artificial life program that simulates the processes involved in the evolution of organisms

Watch a simulation of artificial life and evolution

And so what I've done is, I've taken the same kinds of things and looked at other aspects of evolutionary life and say,

lifted off the ground for about 12 seconds.

And when we take that, we take this idea of what culture is doing and add it to what the long term trajectory again, in life's evolution we find that each case each of the major transitions in life what they're really about is accelerating and changing the way in which evolution happens.

Ecological development.

And that blew my mind.

So all these steps in evolution are increasing, basically, the evolution of evolvability.

Life is change.

(Laughter)

Some journeyed to the moons and planets.

So people believe now that Titan is most likely what we call a pre biotic planet, because it's so cold organic material did not get to the stage of becoming biological material, and therefore life could have evolved on it.

As you can see, up in the upper right hand corner, we still break eggs.

Actually, I think it's a great way to teach kids about evolutionary biology and developmental biology and all sorts of things.

More years were added to average life expectancy in the 20th century than all years added across all prior millennia of human evolution combined.

So I was just intrigued with what you know, what is this animal's story?

And he started doing that, started giving these little numerical organisms things they could play with playing chess with other machines and so on.

I worked hard in expectation of promotion.

More and more of the inert matter of the globe is being touched and animated by life.

So for instance, when Julius Caesar arrived in North Africa, huge areas of North Africa were covered in cedar and cypress forests.

It's not confined to its own lineage.

Evolution.

Evolution acts as a sieve. It sieves out the bad variation.

Accelerated Darwinism.

And so forget about evolution in a kind of metaphysical way.

Evolve biomorphs using genetic algorithms

Again and again in nature, from the very most ancient bacteria to more recent species, they go through a juvenile phase of hostile competition to establish themselves,

A chromosome, by the way, is just a piece of inert chemical material.

Another thing all these molecules are telling us that, apparently, bioluminescence has evolved at least 40 times, maybe as many as 50 separate times in evolutionary history, which is a clear indication of how spectacularly important this trait is for survival.

You can't get ahead if you don't work hard.

And then evolution used those body plans to evolve higher cognitive functions, and biological evolution kept accelerating.

But it's not really a debate.

Their breakthrough technology is synthetic biology.

Every organism on the planet shares ancestry with a single common ancestor.

I don't get it.

little more than half my age.

But of course they too contain the work of others

On at least one, and maybe only one of those planets, primitive life evolved, which evolved over millions of years into things that walked upright and left footprints about three and a half million years ago in the mud flats of Tanzania, and eventually

That's what we're talking about.

Why, then, do rocks look and feel solid and hard and impenetrable?

In the natural cycle of life and death, the creation and destruction that must happen continuously.

Well, to end on a very positive note,

These are survival skills.

This is evolution. Copy, transform and combine.

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